Free Public Health

Socialist humanity is greedy. They don’t appreciate the sacrifices of others. Their manners are forgotten because “rights” do not require “please” or “thank you”.

Free Public Health?

The pastor of a local church recently condemned the public health system for allowing more services to be paid directly by those who receive them. Entitlement was his argument. Greed is another name for entitlement.

Others in that same meeting agreed with him saying that medial care should be free for everyone as a basic right of citizenship. Whenever I hear Canadians talk about this topic, they never discuss the costs, or if they do, “make the rich pay” is the thread of their proposal.

With ‘rights’ must go responsibility or else rights,  freedoms and prosperity will erode. Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher understood this when the said:

The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. It is superior because it starts with the individual, with his uniqueness, his responsibility, and his capacity to choose. Surely this is infinitely preferable to the socialist-statist philosophy which sets up a centralized economic system to which the individual must conform, which subjugates him, directs him and denies him the right to free choice. Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose."

Forced to ration.

The Ontario public health system has been increasingly rationing its services to reduce costs. Modern medical care is so expensive that it now commands about half of the annual provincial budget. Costs continue to rise for many reasons but a major one is demographic. Our aging population expects free government medicine at the stage of life when their needs for care rise rapidly.

Services that have been eliminated from “public health” are now to be found in the non-government sectors and available typically from private clinics on a user-pay or insurance co-pay basis. Virtually every country in the Eurozone has a “two-tier” health care system while many Canadians stubbornly hang on to the idea that “money grows on trees”. It offends their notion of “citizen rights” if they must pay out-of-pocket for any medical care.

The pastor is an elderly man.

As he professed his right for free medicine, I secretly wished that he would thank everyone in his audience for paying their high taxes to make his care “free”. Instead of doing this, he left me with the image of a greedy man who did not even have the good  sense to thank his benefactors.

I can’t be too hard on this man, however.  He, like so many others who praise the myth of “free health care”, has been swimming in the Kool-Aid of state-funded propaganda that speaks only of its merits and none of its shortcomings.

As a “man of God”, he has also armed himself with biblical passages that support his socialist notions, and he is quick to quote them as if they are the “supreme authority” on the topic. I wonder why it never occurs to him that those words were written by religious scholars over 1500 years ago at a time when the idea of “free public health” would not be invented for another dozen centuries.